009 Mark Sundeen: Delusions and Grandeur

Mark Sundeen is an accomplished novelist and essayist, author of The Man Who Quit Money, a bestselling biography of Daniel Suelo, who sold all his things to live in a Utah cave. Now Mark has published a collection of similar nonfiction portraits of people who inhabit the American West, the drifters and dreamers who once populated L.A. and San Francisco before those cities got too expensive. His book, Delusions + Grandeur, also turns out to be a chronicle of American masculinity in the age of Trump.

Mark and I were both slightly disaffected teenagers in an L.A. beach town back in the day, so the conversation moves everywhere. We talk about Alta California before 1849, the Standing Rock protests in 2016, and Jack London’s adventures as a famous-but-somehow-obscure American writer. Oh, plus his contributions to surfing.

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Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Podcast Addict, Pocketcasts

Resources:

Delusions and Grandeur, by Mark Sundeen

The Man Who Quit Money, by Mark Sundeen

A BBC video on the man who quit money, also by Mark

Sweetness and Blood, Mike’s peripatetic history of surfing